gurpsfandomcom-20200214-history
Forum:Content Discussion
Do we need articles on generic roleplaying concepts? I think articles on Roleplaying or Gamemaster. At best, they should be redirected to Wikipedia. There is no need to do what Wikipedia does better. Further, I don't think we need articles on GURPS or Steve Jackson. What can we add to them that wouldn't belong to Wikipedia? Are we going to maintain them? Eventually, those articles will become obsolete forks, as the Wikipedia articles are more frequently updated, and any effort put into ours will be wasted, compared to the effort put into Wikipedia articles. In other words, I think that for every article (content) we create, we should ask ourselves: can I add this article (content) to Wikipedia? And if the answer is yes, then we should add it to Wikipedia, and only create a redirect from our wiki. Further, as a style issue, we should not red link terms that should be only on Wikipedia (I look at Steve Jackson article and wonder why on Earth would we want to have an article on Steve Jackson Games, Inc. v. United States Secret Service... Wikipedia covers it well enough.? --Piotrus 21:37, 6 April 2009 (UTC) : I disagree with you about redirecting. But I do agree with you about not reinvent the wheel. The whole point of GFDL is we can port the pages over to this wiki; to start us us off on the topic. Then we can give them a GURPS relevant emphasis. I Totally disagrees with you that Wikipedia does it better. They forbid primary sources, you have to fight tooth and nail to use secondary sources, So information that say on the GURPS forums or pyramid is basically "useless" as far as Wikipedia. as to the entry on Steve Jackson and Steve Jackson Games only survive "deletions purges", because of Steve Jackson Games, Inc. v. United States Secret Service "notability". But you note their version does not cover any of it of how much the miss deadlines of holding their files hurt SJGames and almost made them close their doors. Because all that information is only in primary sources. : But by all means our versions should have a See also section that link back to Wikipedia, but I don't think they can do it better than a wiki that that is closer to the topic --Roguebfl(talk) 22:31, 6 April 2009 (UTC) :: I just checked; neither SJ or SJG were ever nominated for deletion. I do however agree that our gurps wiki should be more open to sources like sourcebooks, forums, and fanmade content in general. However I currently don't see what useful our wiki could say about SJ or SJG that isn't said on Wikipedia. I just compared the SJ articles here and on Wikipedia: the only difference is that our article has no infobox or photo... As for info missing from the case, I suggest adding it to the talk of Wikipedia, and requesting references. I don't really see how useful this would be to the article about GURPS (remember, in the end, this is a wiki about GURPS, not SJG, and I want to avoid having an article on SJ family or his favorite pet). --Piotrus 17:12, 9 April 2009 (UTC) ::: The reason the pages are the same is because I copy the page as a starting point. The referaces will be rejected as "primary or secondary source". and to be blunt page that just say "See wikipedia" make the Wiki look bad. As to why we need them, is unlike TSR or whitewolf, the people at SJGames are actively involved with the community. and as freelancers a good deal of the authors come from the community. and if we are making a resource for the community we need to explain to those new who these people are. And if I start an article on "Kromm Notes" we got to explain who the beep is Kromm and why his notes matter. Or Onno's vehicles. --Roguebfl(talk) 20:08, 10 April 2009 (UTC) ::: P.S. as to why have the basic pages as well, because we don't want to send some away from the wiki for stuff that is actually related to the basics of play GURPS because they would have to work to get back here, which is bad for building community. We only want to send the away for details that not related to playing GURPS. Like when we cover the GURPS World of Darkness books what a basic explanation of that it is, and we will send details off to whitewolf. but We can't just say go here. hen need to give a little bit of information the of what it is, and so they can decide if they actually want details or simple want to move on to a different aspect of GURPS. --Roguebfl(talk) 21:10, 10 April 2009 (UTC) ::: Do we have a resolution to this? As I'm kind holding of on working on some stuff pending the outcome 8) --Roguebfl(talk) 01:16, 16 April 2009 (UTC) :::: I think that we should concentrate on GURPS-specific issues, but I am not going to stop others from doing what they want. I just want you to think about what 99% people will want to read about and where, and on how confusing it can be to have the same concept discussed in various places. --Piotrus 19:11, 16 April 2009 (UTC) Ideas for Content Since this page is called 'Content Discussion' (that was probably an over-generic choice) I'm using it for this question. When I originally found this wiki I was looking for somewhere which could have example campaigns and stuff. This is mostly because when I first decided to GM a GURPS campaign the first thing I did for ideas was Google GURPS Adventures (or campaigns or something, I don't remember exactly) and I found one example which was on the official GURPS website and it was for a horror campaign and stuff, and while I found it interesting it wasn't exactly helpful to me. I think I found another one a little later but it was similarly styled and unhelpful. I ended up doing a generic "Werewolves! You must kill!" (which, by the way, is still pretty much by de-facto fallback adventure, your hired to kill someone with special powers. It's really easy to make fast). I'd really like to have some example adventures with variety. (I'm just giving my motivations) I was thinking that it might be good if we came up with ideas for articles if only to discuss what kinds of articles we're going to have. In my opinion the older GURPS wiki had the problem of seeming too 'owned', where, looking at the articles, it felt like the author was in possession of the article and you couldn't edit it even if it wasn't complete or was poorly written. I think we should consider coming up with policies inviting collaboration, and saying that if someone writes something that they should't mind it if someone else edits it. The Fiction wiki has (or had, I haven't really been keeping up) rules like that. Not where we force people to let others edit they're articles, just strongly suggest they be okay with that before making it. For whatever reason the other GURPS wiki didn't seem overly useful to me, I never visited after I first found it cause it just didn't strike my fancy. It'd be nice if people didn't feel that way about this wiki. So, I'm thinking about making a Space Adventure (with example campaign) mostly just for the fun of inventing Sci-fi spacy-things (Big Dumb Objects For The Win!) but also providing example animals and planets (and maybe a solar system) created with GURPS Space (a very useful book for this kind of campaign) which could be useful for people who don't have time to create they're own (as it takes time; I've never completed a solar system before). I've also been thinking that the Death of Umar Zaire needs maps of the crime scenes and detailed lists of objects and stuff that can be found through investigating the scenes. Except that there can't be anything related to the crime if it was supernatural... So maybe I'll make a Mystery version where he's killed by someone. --Modred. (talk) 01:26, 22 April 2009 (UTC) :It's interesting to note that my experience was very much the same: I wanted to run an Infinite Worlds campaign for a long time, but truth be told, I am not the best in coming up with adventure ideas - so I wanted to look at other IW campaigns out there to get a feeling of what others are doing. And other then the (now offline...) old gurps wiki with one campaign idea and one seed, there was (and as far as I can tell, still is) nothing out there to help IW GMs looking for ideas :( (I mean, there are plenty of alternate history websites, but none geared towards IW-verse). So I fully support the idea of using this site to host campaigns, seeds and related stuff! :I fully agree that we should avoid the problems outlined in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Ownership_of_articles , although we may need some specific policy on what to do if one editor wants to edit a campaign posted by another. :What we need to have, in order to make this wiki useful, is simply more content :) So I hope that those of you who have in the past designed stuff that can be used in GURPs adventures will not hesitate to share it here! --Piotrus 18:18, 22 April 2009 (UTC) The Names of GURPS Books I think the only GURPS book that currently has an article is GURPS Fantasy. The List of GURPS books page has links to Basic Set (4e). I'm wondering how we should name the articles on GURPS books? I mean, for Fantasy for example we might call it GURPS Fantasy, Fantasy, Fantasy (4e), GURPS Fantasy (4e), or something else. I'm not sure what naming convention we should use. Myself I always refer to GURPS books using their full name, like GURPS Fantasy. --Modred. (talk) 05:53, May 27, 2010 (UTC) : I would avoid strong putting the Edition number in the page name, Firstly because they are Books with Edition number in the names. Such as GURPS ''Uplift Second Edition'' where both Edition are withing the same System Edition. Secondly Putting the GURPS in the title is important, and GURPS Fantasy is a good example as a Genre Books and the Genre are reasonably separate topics. Now Personally I don't think we need separate articles, separate headers sure but the difference between the editions is probably one things we can most safely talk about in detail without stepping on Copyright. —Roguebfl(talk) 06:26, May 27, 2010 (UTC) :: Well that's not all we could do. On the GURPS Forums they have a list of all the templates in all the books, all they have is the name of the templates and their page numbers, but still. I think stuff like would be good, listing like which Spells are in a book for example, but not anything more about the spells then their name and what page they're on. I think that would be fine with SJG. Like the Worlds of Infinite Worlds article, listing all the timelines, their current year, and which book they're in. ::I don't think we should worry about copyright so much so, what we should do is think "how can we supplement the GURPS books, without trying to replace them?" as long as we keep to that sort of mentality we should be fine. --Modred. (talk) 00:01, May 28, 2010 (UTC) ::: Well that why I said Detail, yes such lists, like GURPS Technomancer lists which spells it has that did not make it into the 4e Magic. ::: Hum Perhaps instead of putting the System Edition in the Page name (unless it in its title such as GURPS ''Basic Set, 3rd Edition, Revised'') We made Edition Categories, so people can get a list of Books by edition that way? BTW Where are you on wither or not to have GURPS in the page names; remember there are GURPS books with out that in the beginning of the name, Such as Hellboy and Prime Directive. —Roguebfl(talk) 00:37, May 28, 2010 (UTC) ::::Umm, well if you want GURPS in the article names I'm good with that. And I mean for now I don't imagine we'll be making descriptions of the 3rd edition books anyway. But I do like the idea of having seperate articles for 3rd versus 4th edition, as I think they're fairly dramatically different. ::::What I think we should do is make the book titles like GURPS Fantasy be redirects to the current edition, like GURPS Fantasy (4e), that way when 5th edition comes out (I'm assuming that'll eventually happen) we can make GURPS Fantasy (5e) and then make GURPS Fantasy redirect to that without much hassle. --Modred. (talk) 03:54, May 28, 2010 (UTC) ::::I just realized that won't work. Cause even though that would make changing the GURPS Fantasy page into a simple redirect to the current edition, the whole idea of doing that was so that all the links could just point to GURPS Fantasy so that people wouldn't have to type (4e) into their links, but if people didn't then when 5th edition comes out we'd have to scour the wiki for links to GURPS Fantasy and make them links to GURPS Fantasy (4e). So I agree now, we shouldn't put the edition in the page name, except maybe for older edition books (like 3e and stuff). I'm gonna move Infinite Worlds to GURPS Infinite Worlds now. --Modred. (talk) 23:58, May 29, 2010 (UTC) Other Naming Conventions Another Wiki naming convention I'm familiar with is when ever possible Article names should be singular and Categories plural. ass it much easyer to type campaigns then campaign —Roguebfl(talk) 01:15, June 4, 2010 (UTC) :I agree. Do you know if there's a standarization of capitalizing or not the first letters in article names? I mean the first one you have to, but like for Creating A Character we have it capitalized, for Non-player character we don't capitalize first letters, and for Infinite Worlds characters we combine capitalized and non-capitalized first letters (that one needs renaming). I think we should standardize it so we know when making a link, like when I think and remembers there's a Worlds of Infinite Worlds article, I want to be able to think to it without searching for it's name. :I think we should standardize to having the first letters capitalized as that seems to be the way the majority of the articles are named now. --Modred. (talk) 01:27, June 4, 2010 (UTC) ::Well Infinite Worlds would be all caps because it's a title. My gut react would got the Non-player character with only the first letter cap because then non-player character auto works in a sentence. But I'm not sure about cases like Creating A Character —Roguebfl(talk) 01:45, June 4, 2010 (UTC) :::Since titles like Infinite Worlds should be capped, I think we should standardize that as the way to go. Otherwise we'll have mixtures of capped and non-capped articles. I think it'd be shiny to just make them all the same all the time. --Modred. (talk) 01:51, June 4, 2010 (UTC)